Busy, Busy day

I haven’t mentioned the hotel we are staying at. We decided to stay at the Zhong tang hotel in Beijing. It is a very small hotel, only 17 rooms, I think. It is in the old part of Beijing (which is actually in the center of the city) and the building is over 400 years old!

This is the outside of our room, which looks into the courtyard. We are in the room on the left. Our room is small, but decent. It has 2 single beds (that are hard as rocks, but I think that is pretty standard here in China). The bathroom is tiny, but it does the job. I jokingly said you can take a shower, go to the bathroom, and brush your teeth all at the same time! We don’t have a refrigerator at this hotel, and I am really missing cold drinks!

We spent today touring and had a good time. We are touring with part of another family, Bill and his mom Bea, so they will be the other American’s you may see or hear about. It was a georgous day for touring today! Bright and lots of sun, but not too hot. We went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City first. They are so MASSIVE! It was interesting to see some of the renovations that have been done – the difference in the colors of painting at the tops of the building was amazing. The newly restored ones just pop out at you.

I had my first adventure with a Chinese person. Many love to have their picture taken with Americans, and I was watching a family with a little one in split pants and they saw me watching and pulled Bea and I over to get in the picture with them. Check out the little cheek hanging out of the split pants!

When we were walking to our van, a woman selling silk purses kept following me trying to get me to buy some. If I remember correctly, I think she started out with 5 purses for 100 American dollars, and by the time she finally stopped following me (about 3 blocks!!!) she was down to 5 for 10 dollars. I have no idea if it was a good deal or not, but boy was she persistent! We just keep saying, “Bu!” which means no! (I’m not sure if this is how you spell it, but we also say Bu ya which means no, I don't want any and Bu xie xie which means no thank you.) It didn't do much good, though, as we still got hounded.

Our next stop was lunch at a local family’s house. I’ll admit I was nervous about this one, but it was really nice. The woman just kept bringing out dish after dish. I tried most of the dishes, but I stuck mostly to rice and vegetables. I wish I had taken a picture of the alleyway we walked back to get to the room. Our guide, Joe, explained that this was one room of their house and they probably had 3 or 4 other rooms, but they were not connected! The rooms were just added wherever they could over the centuries.

After lunch, we took a rickshaw tour of the hutong, which are the older neighborhoods. It was interesting to see the houses all squished together. It is like a maze – there are little alleys (for lack of a better word) everywhere. I don’t remember seeing any kind of street signs.

Next we went to the silk factory. We first saw some of the cocoons, and they explained the difference between single and double cocoons. The single ones make one long strand of silk, which is what they use to make clothes. The double ones get used in quilts. She showed us how they get the silk started, and pull 8 strands together to make a strong strand. Then we saw how they stretch the cocoons on a small hoop, then a larger one, and finally got to try it (one cocoon) being pulled to the size of a quilt! It was pretty cool. We didn’t do so well. Rodney grabbed too much, so they told him he was too strong. They explain why silk quilts are so wonderful, then walk you over to a wall of quilts and say what size do you want? Boy, do they have this down to a science! When I made a comment (trying nicely to get out of buying one), we don’t have room in our luggage for anything like that, they whip out the packaged quilt that has been vacuum packed and it is flatter than a laptop! They have it all figured out for us, don’t they? We didn’t get a quilt, but we did buy Emma two traditional Chinese silk outfits, one that should fit her now, and a bigger one for when she is older.

As many of you know, the National Geographic for May is all about China. We saw them advertised here, and we bought one written in Chinese! How cool is that? We also have the English version at home.

Our next stop was the Chinese Acrobats show. The performance was amazing. Oh, the crazy things they think up! I think there were about 20 women on one bicycle at one time! The acrobats are SO flexible. I have no idea how they can contort their bodies like that. It just isn’t natural!

Our last stop of the day was dinner. This was our first dinner out at a restaurant. Our guide, Joe, orders a variety of dishes and everyone samples. We had a table with a large lazy susan in the middle, and you just spin it around and take what you want. Rodney has been trying everything, while I stick to the basics. I guess the main dish this evening was Peking duck. They had some sort of flat, wafer thin pancake (I guess like a won ton wrapper?) to put the duck meat, sauce, and vegetables on, then wrap it up kind of like a burrito. Rodney liked it, I didn’t even try it! I know many people will say I’m missing out, but I’m just not very adventurous!

My internal clock is definitely not adjusting to China. I slept from 11 PM to 2 AM and now I’m wide awake and working on posting here. I guess it is a good thing that I am used to functioning on little sleep! I had hoped to be a little more witty and interesting on these posts, but when you are only getting a couple of hours sleep on a rock hard bed, it’s a little difficult to be funny!

We are having a great time, but we can’t wait to get to Guangzhou and then home with Emma Lee!